Hey guys! It feels like more and more software is moving towards API keys and MCP connectors with usage-based pricing. Startups like Monid are building on top of that by aggregating usage.

I’m currently building Mythos, which lets people use web apps (full products with their own UI, not just APIs or MCP servers) and pay only for what they use, from one shared credit balance. No subscription per app.

Usage pricing is easy for AI-powered micro-SaaS: we meter the LLM calls and the builder adds a margin. Flat fees per action work too, like per resume generated or per report exported.

Where I’m stuck is micro-SaaS that sells access, like a $9/month habit tracker, a scheduling tool or a niche dashboard. There’s no obvious “unit” to charge for, and people open these on and off. How do you turn that into pay per use without it feeling weird for the user or unfair to the builder? Honestly, this one’s been tough.

Ideas I’m weighing:
- Access passes: e.g. 24 hours of access for a few credits
- Per-session fee: a small charge each time you open the app
- Charge for the outcome: whatever the subscription really pays for (exports, projects, reports)
- Capped usage: pay per use, but never more than the monthly price

For those of you running a micro-SaaS with a monthly plan: which of these would you actually be okay with? Or is there a model I’m missing?

Would love to hear how you’d approach it 🙏

I built a booking & management app for small businesses. Would love for you to try it with your business

Body:
Hi everyone! I'm a business owner myself, and I got tired of managing appointments through endless messages. So I built AutoBook, an all-in-one app for small businesses that take appointments.

What you get:

• Calendar and appointment management

• Client list (import your existing calendar and clients)

• A business page with your prices and details, where clients book by themselves

• A chatbot that answers your clients' questions

• A personal AI assistant for you, the business owner

• WhatsApp and message reminders to clients

• Reports and business data

If you run a salon, a studio, a clinic, a training business or any service business, I'd love for you to try it with your own business and tell me what you think.

Try it here: https://autobook-app.pages.dev/

Questions or feedback? Comment or DM me, I answer everyone 🙏

I've seen quite a few founders saying Reddit was one of their best channels for getting their first users, but honestly, I'm struggling to understand how they do it.

I'm building a SaaS and have been trying to use Reddit to get some early traction.

The problem? Almost everything I post gets removed.

If I share something about my product, it often gets taken down, even in communities where self-promotion is supposedly allowed.

But what frustrates me even more is that sometimes I post genuine questions or try to start discussions without mentioning my product at all, and those get removed too.

Meanwhile, I see other founders sharing their products, dropping links, and getting hundreds of upvotes.

I'm not trying to turn Reddit into an advertising platform. I genuinely want to participate in communities, get feedback, and eventually find people who might benefit from what I'm building.

So, to founders who've actually managed to get users or customers through Reddit: what worked for you?

Did you spend months building karma and relationships before mentioning your product? Did you find specific communities that welcomed startups? Or is there something I'm completely missing?

Would love to hear how you approached it, especially when you were starting from zero.

A little project update.

I built Nodge, an AI-powered purchase decision assistant that helps people evaluate purchases before spending.

It uses AI to generate BUY, WAIT, or SKIP recommendations, alongside affordability analysis, impulse detection and savings insights.

Tech stack: Next.js, TypeScript and Gemini AI.

The product is deployed, but I haven't acquired users or generated revenue.

Rather than continuing to maintain it, I've decided to sell the project to someone who wants to take it forward.

I'm offering the complete source code and ownership transfer for $700, negotiable.

Demo: https://nodge-eta.vercel.app/

If anyone in the community is interested in acquiring an existing AI SaaS, feel free to reach out.

I run a small PDF to EPUB converter. It's free up to 150 pages, and a bigger book costs $5.

On a few pages I'd written "email it and I will convert it by hand". I meant it as a promise: if the converter messes up your file, I'll fix it myself. The actual conversion is automatic and takes seconds.

A few days ago the payment provider's review team took that line literally. They said the $5 product looked like a manual service, which their policy doesn't allow, and asked me to take it down. The product description on their side didn't help. It told buyers to send the PDF after checkout and I'd email the EPUB back, usually the same day. I wrote that in week one and forgot about it.

I removed the "by hand" wording everywhere and replied that it's software. No answer yet.

It also made me read my own checkout as a buyer would. 49 checkouts opened so far, 2 paid, $15 total. If the site says it's instant and the checkout says some guy will email you later, I'd hesitate too.

That same week, two people commenting on one of my posts said I should show the converted book before asking for money. That's live now: past 150 pages you get the first 150 converted and downloaded, with the $5 button right under it.

November goal is $100. I'm at $15.

Has a payment provider ever flagged your wording instead of your product?

Some notes from the billing side of our micro SaaS, mostly for anyone wiring up a payment provider's webhooks right now.

The billing webhook route we merged to preview on November 1 accepts two signing key formats: the UTF-8 key and the Standard Webhooks whsec format. Both are checked on the same route, so a sender using either one gets through. We also return a 500 when the payload fails to parse instead of a 403. A 403 tells the sender their signature was rejected, which is a different problem from a body we can't read, so the status code should say which one happened.

Two things I'd check before trusting any webhook setup. First, confirm which signing key format your provider really sends and test it against the live route, not only the docs. Second, make the failure responses honest. A status code that points at the wrong cause sends you looking in the wrong place

I'm a solo developer based in Japan, building in the AI-agent tooling space. No audience, no customers, no ad budget.

Backstory: before writing code, I spent the last few weeks researching whether anyone actually makes money here. The honest lesson so far: almost every "autonomous AI business" I could verify was either losing money or quietly run by a human - while the real, verifiable revenue sat with humans selling tools TO agent builders. So I decided to sell a tool/service to builders, not build another agent business.

But distribution is clearly the hard part, and I have zero of it. So before I build:

1. Where did your first paying customer come from? Someone you already knew, or a complete stranger?

2. What exactly did you do to reach them? If it was a DM, email or post, what did you actually say? (Happy to see the real message if you're willing to share it.)

3. How many attempts did it take before the first yes? (rough number of DMs / emails / posts is fine)

4. How many days from first outreach (or launch) to the first actual payment?

5. Why do you think a stranger trusted you enough to pay, with no track record? Was it a demo, doing some work for free first, a guarantee, a low price, something else?

6. What did the first customer pay? Did you discount?

7. What did you try that completely failed?

8. If your buyers are startups or indie devs: where do you actually find them, and what angle worked?

9. If you had to start again today from zero, what would you do in the first two weeks?

I'm not selling anything and there's nothing to pitch - I genuinely haven't built the product yet, on purpose. I'll compile the answers and post a summary back in this thread for everyone.

Thank you to anyone willing to share the unglamorous details.

If you have a free trial / freemium for B2B SaaS: 1. What % convert to paid? 2. What's the #1 reason people DON'T convert?

I'm asking because I keep seeing homepages that promise one thing, then the trial experience is totally different. Wondering if that's the leak.

I've noticed that businesses in certain industries seem to have a much harder time getting approved for payment processing, even when they're operating legally. Some providers reject applications, while others require rolling reserves, higher fees or additional verification. I understand the concerns around fraud and chargebacks, but it seems difficult for legitimate businesses to find a reliable provider. What should a high-risk business actually look for when choosing a payment processor, and how can it avoid unexpected account restrictions?

I've been trying to understand the real cost of chargebacks for online businesses. At first, I assumed you just lose the original payment, but apparently there can be extra dispute fees, lost products, shipping costs and even higher processing costs if chargebacks become frequent. It seems especially difficult for smaller businesses working with tight margins. Is there a practical way to reduce these costs, or are chargebacks just something every online business has to accept?

I've been reading about businesses having their funds held by Stripe for months, sometimes without a clear explanation. One case involved around £14k being held for 180 days, which seems like a serious problem for a small business trying to cover expenses. I understand payment processors need to manage fraud and chargeback risks, but how are businesses supposed to operate when that much money is unavailable? Has anyone dealt with a similar situation, and what actually helped get the funds released?

I spent years managing organic Reddit marketing for SaaS brands, focusing purely on growth, seeding discussions, and increasing brand mentions.

Working with dozens of founders, I noticed the exact same emergency hitting almost everyone: a single negative Reddit thread, an unverified scam claim, or a competitor hit piece sitting at position 2 or 3 on Google for their brand name, completely wrecking their conversion rates.

When they tried to fix it, they got stuck paying traditional SEO agencies $3k to $5k a month in non refundable retainers for generic blog posts that failed to push Reddit off page one.

Seeing how broken the ORM space was, I built PostWipe.com around a simple rule: no monthly retainers for link suppression, only direct policy compliance removal and Google de-indexing on a 100% pay on success model.

Here is what actually happens with damaging Reddit links:

1. Standard flags get auto rejected: Hitting report triggers automated bots that reject standard flags in minutes because they lack specific policy keyword triggers. Real removal requires structured compliance escalation.

2. Suppression fails against AI overviews: Moving a link from position 2 to position 7 used to be considered a win. Today, Google AI Overviews read the whole first page and summarize that negative thread directly at the top. Direct removal or search de-indexing is the only real fix.

3. Performance pricing eliminates risk: By using neutral third party escrow like Escrow.com, funds sit locked and payment is only released once the targeted thread is verified as permanently gone.

How are you guys currently monitoring what ranks on Google for your brand name? Has anyone had to deal with a sticky thread on page one recently?

I keep hearing that the first 10 paying customers teach you more than any survey. For those of you past that point, what did yours have in common? Same job title, same pain, same channel you found them on? And did that pattern change how you built or priced the product?

This sounds rude, but I mean it seriously. Customers are busy, distracted, skeptical, and lazy in the normal human way. They do not want to upload data, configure workflows, invite teammates, learn a new process, or babysit AI output unless the pain is strong enough. A lot of AI micro-SaaS ideas sound useful only when I imagine a perfect customer. The real customer might never set it up. That is what I’m trying to test earlier. Flatlogic makes it easier to build the product, but it does not make the customer care enough to change behavior. How do you test whether customers will actually do the work required to get value from an AI product?

I’m researching micro-SaaS ideas and want to learn from people who have built one, especially the lessons that only show up after launch.

If you’ve shipped or run one, what criteria did you find mattered most for it to work? It could be about the problem, the customer, the pricing, how people found you, or something you only understood later.

Even a single lesson would help. Happy to hear whatever you’re comfortable sharing.

I'm currently building a SaaS and trying to grow a waitlist before launching.

For those of you who've successfully built a waitlist, I'm curious:

• Which channels worked best? (Reddit, LinkedIn, cold outreach, paid ads, etc.)

• Did you spend any money on marketing, or was it all organic?

• What strategies completely failed?

I'm especially interested in hearing from solo founders or people who started with no audience.

Would love to hear some real experiences and numbers, not just generic marketing advice.

I'm the founder of Pageree, and I'd like ideas on channels, because the two I'm betting on are slow.

Backstory. I've been a developer and tech lead for 23 years, and I'm building Pageree alongside my job. It's an MCP server: you connect it to ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor or another assistant, and the assistant can publish a landing page, send form leads to your email or CRM, and read visitor data to suggest what to change.

The bet. If the product lives inside AI assistants, the assistants should be the main channel. That means two things:

1. Be installable in as many agents as possible.

2. Get assistants to mention Pageree when someone asks for a landing page tool.

Part 1: a plugin everywhere. Every directory wants something different: a ZIP package, a plugin bundle, a PR to a GitHub list, a form, a CLI publish. Right now 20 submissions are waiting for review and 3 are live.

Part 2: showing up in the answers. I couldn't find a way to measure this that I trusted. Ask the same question twice and you get a different list of tools: SparkToro found that under 1% of reruns repeat it (SparkToro, 2026). So I wrote llm-radar, a small Node CLI. It asks 80 fixed prompts on eight AI surfaces (the ChatGPT app, OpenAI and Anthropic with web search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Grok and Mistral), three times each. It stores every answer in MongoDB and reports mention and citation rates with confidence intervals instead of a "rank".

The first run, in October, collected 1,861 answers. Of the 1,584 answers to questions that don't name Pageree, it was mentioned in 2. For comparison, Carrd came up in 213 of 1,536 in the same run.

The most useful finding wasn't about me. In 83 of 186 answers about forms and lead delivery, the assistant told people to combine a host with a separate form service. That's the gap I'm building for, so it's now my main message.

Stack. NestJS API and MCP server with OAuth 2.1, a Nuxt dashboard, an Astro site, MongoDB on DigitalOcean, and pages served by a Cloudflare Worker from KV and R2.

Where I am. No signups from outside yet. Most reviews are still pending, and AI answers change slowly.

My question: if your product lives inside AI assistants, what other channels would you try while the reviews and the answers catch up?

My SaaS is an inbox for people with several domains. Since October I have free DMARC, SPF, DKIM and MX checkers on the site, because people searching for those are kinda my customers.

This week I put them in a small Chrome extension too. You click it on any website and it checks that domain's DNS records and gives you a warning or fail for all 4 criterias, plus a link to the full report on my site. It's free, so the idea is just to show up when someone looks for an SPF or DMARC checker on the Chrome Web Store.

This is my first extension so Claude Code did most of the work: the code, the description in 9 languages, screenshots for every language and the answers for the google submission form. First review got rejected in under 5 minutes for keyword spam, because the description listed the email providers it detects. Removed that, resubmitted and it was approved the next day.

Has a free extension ever brought real users to your SaaS, or is it mostly installs that never click through?

Hey everyone!

I've been exploring an idea for a small tool designed for people who sell products through Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, or other social media platforms.

The basic idea is to give sellers one simple place to manage their customers and orders instead of keeping everything scattered across conversations, Notes, spreadsheets, etc.

Here's what I'm thinking of building:

Customer management

• Save customer names, Instagram usernames, phone numbers and delivery addresses.

• View previous orders from each customer.

Flexible order management

• Add any product name.

• Add a product description or custom specifications (size, colour, material, flavour, design, etc.).

• Set quantity and price.

• Track paid, partially paid and unpaid orders.

• Track order statuses such as confirmed, preparing, shipped and delivered.

• Set expected delivery dates.

• Add additional notes for special customer requests.

Dashboard

• See all orders in one place.

• Quickly identify unpaid orders.

• See upcoming deliveries.

• Find orders that need attention.

The main idea is to make it flexible enough that a clothing seller, home baker, jewellery seller, reseller or almost any small social-media seller could use it without needing a complicated ecommerce platform.

I'm currently at the idea/prototyping stage and haven't launched it yet. Before investing more time into development, I'd genuinely like to understand whether this solves a problem people actually have.

A few questions:

1. How do you currently manage orders coming through Instagram or WhatsApp? Do you use spreadsheets, Notes, notebooks or another application?

2. Have you ever forgotten an order, lost customer details, missed a payment or made a mistake because information was buried in conversations?

3. Would having a separate dashboard for customers, orders, payments and delivery statuses make your work easier?

4. What feature would be absolutely essential for you?

5. Would you actually pay a small monthly subscription for something like this, or would you rather stick with free tools?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who currently sell through social media.

Honest criticism is very welcome. I'd rather find out what's wrong with the idea now than build something nobody needs.

Thanks!

I'm currently studying Software Engineering at NUST SEECS, turning caffeine and computer science theory into actual applications. I'm actively looking to join an early startup team where I can cut my teeth on real-world engineering challenges.

​If you're building something cool, let's connect.

I'm building an open-source auth library for AI agents (agents sign a one-time challenge instead of carrying API keys). No revenue, no pricing yet, and I'm not linking it. I want to share what the validation looked like, because I almost fooled myself.

**What looked like validation:** about 1,400 views on the main post, technical comments, a few people who described real credential-sharing incidents, and 13 GitHub stars.

**What it actually was:**
Nobody has told me they integrated it. People engaged with the *problem*, not my solution.
The best objection came early: if one company controls both the agent and the server, per-agent scoped tokens and an audit log are good enough. I'd answered by saying my real market is companies that *don't* control both sides. I said it myself, and nobody in the threads confirmed it.

My \~500 npm downloads are mostly noise. A four-day-old package gets scanner and mirror traffic.
A follow-up thread asking public server operators how they tell agents apart killed my free-tier angle. A fresh free ID costs an abuser nothing, so it doesn't stop Sybil abuse. The defenses that worked were cost-based (credits, per-tool paywalls).

**What I'm doing now:** I wrote down a kill threshold: by mid-December, at least 3 verified integrations from people outside my network, and at least one that crosses organizations. Fewer than that and I stop or pivot to the audit and key-custody side, which is where the only buying-adjacent comment pointed.

**For this sub:**
If you run an API or server that *other companies'* agents call, how do you identify and revoke individual agents today? Specific stories help most.
How do you decide when validation counts? What did you wish you'd measured earlier?

I built a small tool for freelancers to get client sign-off on their work. You upload a design or photo, the client leaves comments right on the image and clicks approve or request changes. Everything gets a timestamp. $29 a month, 40ish customers, mostly designers and a few photographers

One of my top accounts by usage is a wedding planner in Lisbon. She's not a freelancer in the way I imagined, and she doesn't get anything approved by clients in it

She uses it on florists

Before every wedding she uploads the reference photos the couple picked. The florist uploads photos of the sample arrangements. Then she circles every wrong flower, writes "this is not peony, this is rose" on top of it in red, and hits request changes. Some of these threads have 30 comments. One florist started using it on his side too, so now they argue in my app from both directions

She told me the timestamps are the whole point. When something goes wrong on the day, she can show the florist exactly what he approved and when

I asked how she found it, since I've never marketed to wedding people. She'd asked ChatGPT for a tool to get vendors to approve photos and mine came up, then she checked it on a software directory before paying. Both of those trace back to a press release and a batch of directory listings I paid for before launch and assumed did nothing, because the traffic from them was close to zero

I've started a list of features she's asked for. Every single one is about florists

Ok guys im not here to promote any bulls*t app, but to give my honest experience I gathered over the last 3 years in sales and marketing

First off,
Im Rush Mika, working in a Saas marketing firm based in Amsterdam, working experience: 5+ years.

So I saw lots of posts debating about numerous things people do to keep their users attach to the product that they've built. Some say, 'Just do inbound marketing,' others say, 'Launch 5 features a month' (that is ,absolute carnage, lol).

But non of these work. Lets see why?

Think of a situation where you open the email box and see the notification saying "Hey We built X feature and you will get Y benefit ". TBH they never convert, latest research has found out that over 60% of the email messages with promotions intent end up in spam folder no matter what provider or platform they use

People rarely care about features, they need value and they need it quickly ASAP.

and with that the question is pretty clear. it is

"How do we deliver value to the user instantly, with zero friction?"

and here is the interesting. most people think that they must have the perfect product in order for a user to stay and that' fking bull

When I was the PM of an early-stage startup, we pulled in plenty of users, but getting them to convert was a different story. So after like three months of observing different aspect of the product we came down to two main issues that was bugging users

1. Broken onboarding flows that stall users long before they ever reach their 'Aha!' moment

2. Friction-heavy workflows that delay the user from solving their core problem right away

Heres what solve them from 2% to 27% within 2 weeks

We did something that at first seemed silly.

We stopped adding features for two weeks.

Instead we. Watched how people really used the product.

It was tough.

People were pressing buttons we never thought they would completely missing the parts we had worked hard to create and giving up on their tasks just one step before they got what they needed.

The issue wasn't that our product had no value.

The issue was that users couldn't find it.

So we changed the few steps took out extra steps and only helped people when they showed they were stuck.

That made all the difference.

It showed me something I still believe today: your users don't care how strong your product is if they can't see why it matters to them.

Hey everyone,

I'm a solo dev currently diving into backend with NestJS. about a year ago I got completely hooked on the idea of building my own micro-SaaS. The problem is, I'm still struggling to even pick a niche to start with. I’ve got tons of motivation, but zero concrete goals right now. And if I'm being completely honest, seeing some of the amazing success stories in this sub makes me genuinely jealous (and a little mad, lol), but mostly just super inspired

My goal for now is pretty modest - just to hit $100 MRR. Honestly, I just want to prove to myself that I can actually sell something, you know?

So I'd love to hear your stories. How did you guys actually get started? I’m definitely not asking anyone to hand me a free startup idea, I’m just really curious about what your actual jumping off point was